“Everywhere else in the English-speaking world, there’s been an expansion of legal education,” says Eric Colvin, a law professor at Bond University in Australia. “The US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand — the odd country out is Canada.”

Since the ’90s, the number of law school spaces available in Canada hasn’t kept pace with demand, leading more and more Canadians to study abroad. Bond University, not far from Brisbane on the Gold Coast of Australia, has cashed in on that demand. Today more than 120 Canadians are studying there, where they make up about a fifth of the law school.

“I absolutely love the school,” says Tori Chapman, president of the Canadian Law Students Association at Bond, who is originally from London, Ontario.

“The law school itself is fairly small, and the Canadian community’s quite tight.” The CLSA offers workshops and advice on returning to Canada, writing the National Committee on Accreditation exams, and finding articling positions. Chapman says that while there are some hurdles to returning to practise in Canada, they’re getting easier to jump. “There’s been a move by law firms to be a little more open-minded about international law degrees,” she says.

Colvin says about two-thirds of Bond’s Canadian students intend to return to Canada, and that demand for spots has increased so quickly that the school is starting to cap the number of Canadians it accepts.

“Most of our recruitment these days is word of mouth,” he says. “We do a little advertising, but not much.”